


They hate you if you're smart and they despise a fool

by blythechild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angst, Bullying, Caretaking, Child Abandonment, Desperation, Gen, Growing Up, Mental Instability, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 07:21:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5239598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid is just a kid who'll never get out of Vegas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They hate you if you're smart and they despise a fool

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as an attempt to fill a 5 sentence prompt challenge on comment_fic over on LJ, but, well... not so much. That also accounts for the atrocious grammar in this.

He makes it home on a sprained ankle and locks himself in the bathroom to clean up the blood before Mom notices. The books are gone - he doesn't know how he'll explain the loss of her treasured copy of Baudelaire - but he memorized them long ago and besides, you're just _asking for it_ when you put things on display like that; he got careless.

One day he's going to leave this place, this mundane crucible of fear, this acrid star chamber with its indiscernible surveyors and unfathomable rules... he'll just run like his survival depends on it, because it does, and he won't look back. His crazy Mom, his elsewhere Dad, the broken bones and humilations and complete absence of friends will all shrink into the distance behind him as he sprints to a safe place, a place where he'll matter, where it isn't dangerous to know things (or dangerous _not_ to know them), a place where he might be loved, maybe. When he goes to bed, he shuts his eyes tight and dreams of this place and it helps him ignore the damp tracks on his face as Mom yells at the spies in the drywall again and plays Wagner too loud on the hi-fi all night to drive them away.

At night he dreams but in the morning the desert heat wraps him up in its gritty, greedy hands as he tries to look invisible at the bus stop. _Who are you kidding?_ , it whistles through the burnt grass, over the cinderblock cookie-cutters of suburban sprawl, and he knows it's right: he's never getting out - he'll never leave his Mom behind. It doesn't matter how smart he is or how much potential he's got, that's not _useful_ here and _here_ is where he's stuck. Born stuck, stalled, in a place too stupid to withstand and with a crushing understanding of what that means for him. He'll grow up, grow out, lose his hair and his Mom, and that'll be it for him. No one will ever know he was a smart kid, no one will ever tell him he was good at something, he'll never change anyone's life, and he knows that's what his dream is really all about. Escape is beside the point: he only wants to result in something. He wonders if anyone else has ever felt this trapped, ever. 

And then he does what he always has when he's faced with a question he can't answer: he picks up a book and starts reading...


End file.
